The best part of the article appears to me to be the following:
***** One player, Matthew Cook, said he had become obsessed with DopeWars while he was a graduate student at the Marshall School of Business at the University of Southern California. He said the game reflected lessons taught in his classes, including market testing, risk management, inventory control and money management. And of course, in the twilight of the dot-com age, it plays to the interest in sudden riches as players watch the price of drugs skyrocket.
"It's like your company I.P.O.'s at five times what you expected it to," he said. (Mr. Cook's own company, an Internet start-up, recently went under.) *****
Has anyone read _Class Struggle Is the Name of the Game: True Confessions of a Marxist Businessman_ by Bertell Ollman? It's out of print now, I think.
"Class Struggle was a 1970s board game, conceived as a socialist alternative to Monopoly, in which players were randomly assigned to different classes and moved around the board forming cross-class alliances, engaging in struggle, and heading for one of two mutually exclusive destinations: Socialism or Barbarism. The box sported a rather good photo-montage of Karl Marx arm-wrestling Nelson Rockefeller. Improbably enough, a photograph exists of Helmut Kohl at the 1980 Frankfurt Book Fair holding a boxed set of Klassenkampf, the German edition of the game" (at <http://www.voiceoftheturtle.org/dictionary/dict_c1.shtml>).
"Dr Ollman, of New York University, spent seven years working out 'Class Struggle'. It bears a superficial resemblance to 'Monopoly' -- 'another political game', he says -- with players throwing dice and chasing each other round the board. You can be a Worker (with a hammer symbol), a Capitalist (with a top hat) or a member of the minor classes, such as Farmer, Student or Small Businessman. Rule One states that 'Class Struggle' can be played by two to six players; Rule Two adds, though, that the real players are classes, not individuals; Rule Three stresses that only the Workers or the Capitalists can win. That's life, says Dr Ollman" (at <http://pages.eidosnet.co.uk/johnnymoped/isthisthereallife/isthisthereallife_theendofthespectacle_page2.html>).
Visit "Bertel Ollman: Communism Now": <http://www.nyu.edu/projects/ollman/di001.htm>.
Yoshie